New mission: Playing jigsaw puzzles with Birdies Garden Beds.

[Mandy Onderwater]

I'll have a look in to it when I get a chance. I'm about to start cooking dinner, ahaha

 

[Mandy Onderwater]

How's the jogsaw garden going? Plants doing well?

 

[Grandmother Goose]

How's the jogsaw garden going? Plants doing well?

I've been hiding from a summer full of heatwaves, so everything garden is on hold but for watering what I have and hoping it survives until the weather cools down, which is usually around mid-April. I lost a few plants when the temperature hit 45+ at one point, and lost a few pot plants due to forgetting they were there and needed water too. In the meantime I'm working on sorting out my front veranda, which I'll talk more about later, because I can do a lot of the work for that in the shade, and at night when it's cooler.

The puzzle bed in the back yard is on hold until winter when I can transplant the trees back into it, until then it's sitting dormant and empty but for some weeds, and only half filled with soil. The one in the front yard, that was a mammoth job that was put together, pulled apart, rearranged, put together, pulled apart, redesigned, put together, pulled apart, support posts installed, put together, pulled apart, hidden inside the garden bed retaining walls built, put back together... it went on and on, and eventually was the right shape, the right size, in the right position, solid and secure, well braced, and filled with soil and plants. And it's still not quite finished as I have to put the reomesh trellises up on the white posts along the back of the garden bed along the driveway, another one between the veranda posts, and a third between the posts in the regular shaped garden bed beside the garden path. And I'm yet to finish filling up and plant out the normal shaped garden bed.

After all that, of the many pieces of Birdies beds I had of all different shapes and sizes, I have three corner pieces left from a hexagonal bed, two flat pieces of different sizes, some brace bars, and a lot of little nuts and bolts left over.

I decided to plant some miniature pumpkins and rainbow chard in the large garden bed as filler plants and to get something edible growing seeing as I had the space, but it'll be filled with mostly garden plants next spring. It was getting too late in the season and too hot to be planting anything else at the time, and the pumpkins seem to be doing well. Half of them are a bush variety, and I've been training them to grow towards the driveway so they can spill over the edge in that direction instead of taking over the entire garden. I did plant to have them grow up the trellis but the heat of summer hit before I could get the trellis up, so pumpkins spilling into the driveway it is. I've found a few pumpkins growing on them, they're still small, but the plants are also still flowering their little hearts out, so more might be on the way too. The chard has struggled, they wilt a lot and need a lot more water more often than I can keep up with them, so I've taken to putting the hose nozzle on mist and hooking it up on the archway and it mists the whole front yard if the wind is blowing right, that keeps the chard happy in the hotter days.

It'll all be easier to grow stuff in there once the trellises are up and the plants are growing on them and my wollemi pine is a bit taller and it's all creating a bit more shade. Full sun only applies in the mornings and during winter here I have learned. Everything that normally loves full sun wants dappled/light shade in summer from around midday onwards here.

The big garden bed has 3 worm feeders installed, made from pvc pipe with lots of 12mm holes drilled in the sides (12mm purely because that was the first suitable drill bit I blindly pulled out of the tool box). Each feeder has a pvc cap painted dark green with a cupboard draw knob shaped like a mushroom screwed onto the centre of it, painted to look like a mushroom. I had to buy both earthworms and compost worms as there were no worms at all in the yard. I've found that the feeders work well, though since the heat set in I tend to have more pillbugs than worms, but I'm sure they've all just gone deeper underground where it's cooler and will be back in winter. If not, I'll just buy some more and make sure to use more mulch next summer.

My native plants in-ground with lots of rocks reptile retreat section of the front garden is doing its job. Seems every few weeks we have a new dragon in the yard.

Anyway, here's some progression photos and photos of dragons for your viewing pleasure.

 

[Mandy Onderwater]

Ah I don't blame you - it's too bloody hot!
Too bad the bloody weather killed some plants. I got lucky we had some rain (and then it didn't stop) right when my plants were struggling.

A lot of work, but long-term rewards.

Now rainbow chard I had to google. It's a very appealing looking plant. I also wouldn't have expected pumpkin to keep growing during the hot summer! They always seem to wilt and get horrific sun-damage where I am. And I doubt we're quite as bad as where you are.

I LOVE the mushroom caps. They're so darling! What paint did you use?

I love the pictures. And your garden always looks like "home". A little crazy, a little special, a lot magical. It just gives off a "warm" feeling, like a place you want to spend time in. It'd be a place I'd love to explore, and try to spot some wildlife.

 

[Grandmother Goose]

The pumpkin is partially dapple-shaded from the worst of the extreme heat of the afternoon by the big old grevillea robusta tree.

The mushroom caps are white cupboard door knobs with bright red acrylic enamel exterior use paint in a tiny little paint can from a hardware store, which I simply dipped the top of the knob into and hung upside down to drip off, then used same sort of paint but white to add the spots.

I created the garden that way because the way I see it, gardens aren't just about growing food, or flowers, they're about using plants to create a space that we can enjoy being in. If they produce some food, encourage pollinators and other beneficial insects with flowers, support and protect other useful wildlife (the bearded dragons and magpies keep the snail, slug, and grasshopper populations in check), create a bit more cool and shade in summer, delight people with the little ornaments hidden among it all, and have a nice place to sit, take it all in and enjoy it, it's a win. I plan to do my back yard in a similar crazy kind of way, but with a labyrinth of garden "rooms" and a lot more food plants. I'll still have plenty of ornamentals out the back as well, but whereas out the front it's mostly ornamentals with some food plants, out the back will be mostly food plants with some ornamentals.

And my front veranda, which is the current project semi-actively being worked on, will be covered in all indoorsy plants such as monstera, orchids, ferns, pothos, etc; as well as mushrooms, and maybe some lettuce. I need to build a wall of some sort that won't blow down in a storm on the end of the veranda to semi-enclose that end of it, remove the ceiling to expose the rafters, fix/replace any damaged rafters and paint them white, replace the old rusty corrugated iron with new not rusty iron with a few sheets of white polycarbonate roofing to let a bit more light through without increasing the heat too much. I'm currently sanding back and painting the furniture for the veranda as I wait to save the $$ for the roof and wall materials. I'm treating the veranda as just another "room" of my garden. If I had my way, I'd do the same inside the house, but I'm not the only person that has to live here, so I have to keep the house itself a little more normal. Though I might be able to get away with doing something magical with the back half of the house - bathroom, and kitchen... hmm... [ponders how much she can get away with before someone complains]

 

[Mark]

So many amazing pics in this thread and it's cool to see the evolution of the garden too!

 

[Grandmother Goose]

It's a rainy day and I have no much else to do right now, so... Garden Update!

Trellises are up, shade cloth is covering where vines will eventually grow on the rear walls, still haven't decided if I should bother doing same on the arches yet. As the vines grow I'll be training them to weave sideways up the trellises, and as they fill in the area, I'll roll the shade cloth up until the plants reach near the top, then the shade cloth will come off and it'll just be plants on the wire trellis.

The pumpkins I had growing, half produced a fat lot of nothing and are now composting in the garden bed that needs more soil, the rest that did produce some pumpkins are sprawling along the driveway and are now dying back fast that the weather has turned cold. They haven't fully dried out around the pumpkin stems yet, so I'm guessing that means pumpkins aren't ready yet? They haven't started to rot, so there's that.

I really need to get my together and replace the front fence and gates, one of the driveway gates has fallen off, and everything else isn't far behind. Ah, money, money, money.

Need some more soil, need more plants, lots more plants, need more money, for more plants, and front fence, and plants, more plants.

 

[Mandy Onderwater]

Good to hear from you, I was wondering how things have been

I haven't seen your garden wet in... forever. Maybe even ever
I love the flowers and different coloured foliage in your garden, even on dark days it feels alive and magical.

Naughty pumpkins, not producing

Are the fences and gates a repair issue or do the need to be fully replaced? If it's just a few hinges/screws/nails that's not too bad in the long run. Not ideal either way. A replacement though...

 

[Grandmother Goose]

This is the first time I've seen my garden wet like that since forever as well.

The fence is a complete replacement job. It was built nigh 100 years ago, classic Aussie outback mining town style: made with whatever was available at the time, then held up over the years by ramming in more posts, more star pickets, more old water pipes, and tying on whatever was available with whatever was available to keep it from falling down. The wood is fully rotted through, the metal is rusted out, the pedestrian gate is very literally being held together with duct tape. it's only still standing because no one has put any effort into trying to push it over.

 

[James124]

A couple of year ago (wow, has it really been that long?) I bought some small Birdies garden beds to use as tree planters for a little espalier tree garden, because large sections of my yard are sitting on an excessive amount of rock which isn't very conducive to having anything much grow besides weeds. I planted some marigolds between them, and when the marigolds passed on, I collected the seeds from the ones I most liked, and planted some little bush beans in their place.

View attachment 9720

I found that having to bend down to pick the beans made me feel older than I actually am very quickly, although I persisted, the plants grew better than anticipated, and they also persisted much longer than anticipated. I got so many beans off them that I couldn't even give that many away at the time, and after I had no more space in the freezer, I eventually just let them go, stopped watering them, collected enough dried beans to plant a lot more in the future, and let the ground level of the garden suffer and die back, because I wasn't going to be bending over that far to deal with it anymore, it was just too hard.

All the trees went into bloom last Spring, along came a Spring windstorm and blew all the blossoms off the trees, and that was the end that that season of fruit... or so I thought. Somehow both my peach trees managed a full load of fruit each, my sugar plum managed to grow 4 plums, and two of my apple trees maintained one apple each. It seemed weird to nurture a single apple on each tree, but I did it anyway and they were both delicious enough to be worth it, or at least I thought so. If nothing else it gave me a taste of what was to come, which was great.

That's where the joy of this garden ended. My dog started getting into the garden and digging and making a mess, and ate my little banana pup. I put the green garden wire around to stop him, and it did, he saw that as a "not allowed in there" and didn't go in there anymore even though he could have jumped over it easily enough. Then I got stuck puppy sitting someone else's dog, and that dog had no issues with jumping the little garden fence and digging things up, and my dog decided that looked like fun and started doing it too, and he kept doing it even after the other dog was gone. I put chicken wire around the garden to keep him out, and that worked for a while, but he eventually figured out how to tear it down, and he also figured out how to tear down the wires supporting the trees. Then a few extreme thunderstorms killed the solar lights and the remaining wires supporting the trees, the dog kept getting in and digging holes, the trees went dormant at the start of winter, and the only thing left growing in the garden was a new little mandarin tree and loads of disappointment.




View attachment 9721

But I am not so easily defeated.

I decided to get in touch with Birdies Garden Products and ask some questions, which lead to me scouring their website looking at all their different beds, asking more questions, and eventually putting in an order for not just a few new beds, but also for some specific pieces, mostly flat panels, but also some extra specific corner pieces. My goal is to jigsaw puzzle the bed pieces together to create one large non-standard shaped bed to create more raised bed space so I can eliminate the spaces between the trees and grow strawberries under and around them at a height that isn't quite so painful to reach.

The Birdies beds and bits and pieces arrived yesterday. It took me most of the day today to unpack them, and in doing so I realised that one of the beds I'd ordered arrived the wrong colour - my fault, I didn't check the order properly before confirming the purchase, but that's okay, I just ordered another one the right colour and I do have a use for the odd coloured one in another section of the yard that will be done in the further future so it's not a waste, just a change of colour coordination for a different section of the yard in the future. Anyway, there was so much to unpack that among other household chores between boxes, by the time I was done, it was well into the afternoon and I was exhausted (I must say, Birdies doesn't skimp on the quality of their boxes, half the battle with setting up their garden beds is getting the boxes open!) So, I decided to rest for the evening and come here and start a thread telling you all about it, that I can keep updating as I progress in my mission, as it's now too dark to do much more outside and I'm too stuffed to do much more inside other than sit and type.

View attachment 9722

Excuse the dirt on the walls and the hole in the wall, this is part of my laundry room where the dogs get locked in occasionally when needed. The dog I was puppy sitting didn't like that idea and tried to eat his way out of the room through the wall, and I haven't fixed it yet because, well, it's the laundry, in this town it's actually a miracle there's any internal lining on the laundry walls in the first place. It'll get fixed one year, and it does get cleaned now and then, but the dogs just muddy it up first chance they get so I don't put too much effort into that too often. And I only just noticed that the walls in my laundry are painted the same colour as the Birdies beds. Weird.

I was planning today to repaint the support posts in the garden, but time got away from me, so I'll have to do that on Monday because rain is forecast for tomorrow, and I'll need a day for everything to dry out after it. I'm going to paint them a brown colour that the paint shop matched to a rusty bit of metal for me, because the reomesh will rust over time and once it does, I'd like the posts and the rust to not stand out against each other too much and look like it's all meant to be that colour. So tomorrow I guess I'll just have to deal with the trees instead whilst I wait, which will mean pruning them all back and transferring them into large pots for safe mobile keeping, as I'm going to have to do that before putting the new garden bed in place because the current ones are in the way of doing that. Then once the garden bed is in place, filled up, and the trees back where they belong, I'll put up the reomesh trellising, and a makeshift gate, and laugh at my dog's disappointment at not being able to get in and dig around in there. After all that, then I can plant my strawberries and just wait for everything to burst into bloom come spring.

But it won't end there, because I'll be jigsaw puzzling my garden beds in the front yard as well after the espalier tree garden is complete, and that will be an even bigger job with even crazier garden bed shapes, so stay tuned for that one.

"Just tried combining my love for jigsaw puzzles with Birdies Garden Beds this weekend — oddly satisfying! Mapping out the panels and figuring out how everything slots together felt like solving a giant outdoor puzzle. Anyone else get that same oddly therapeutic vibe while assembling theirs?

 

[Grandmother Goose]

"Just tried combining my love for jigsaw puzzles with Birdies Garden Beds this weekend — oddly satisfying! Mapping out the panels and figuring out how everything slots together felt like solving a giant outdoor puzzle. Anyone else get that same oddly therapeutic vibe while assembling theirs?

I wish I could give a definitive yes, but as I went a long way outside of any Birdies bed design and created my own very large abominations, it was a stress test in mathing out the structural integrity of every piece I puzzled with, which required a lot of putting together, pulling apart, putting together another way, pulling apart, rinse and repeat until it was the shape I wanted and strong enough to support the soil, which was not so much fun, but it was beyond satisfying once I got it complete and full of soil and it didn't collapse on me. A normal Birdies bed in a normal configuration is satisfying, but not as satisfying as having really good quality cardboard boxes to store stuff in after the beds are put together, because even their packaging is good quality.

 

[Mandy Onderwater]

This is the first time I've seen my garden wet like that since forever as well.

The fence is a complete replacement job. It was built nigh 100 years ago, classic Aussie outback mining town style: made with whatever was available at the time, then held up over the years by ramming in more posts, more star pickets, more old water pipes, and tying on whatever was available with whatever was available to keep it from falling down. The wood is fully rotted through, the metal is rusted out, the pedestrian gate is very literally being held together with duct tape. it's only still standing because no one has put any effort into trying to push it over.

Typical. We've got few of those here, haha. Our fence is hard to access and I'm ashamed to say our cows escape multiple times a year (thankfully just one at a time - I don't know what'd happen if it were both). The fence is more patch than fence, and truly needs replacing. One of our wooden corner/straining posts is not actually in the ground anymore as that part rotted. We've roughtly wired it to a nearby tree... like 2 years ago.

So I get what you're coming from 100%.

 

[James124]

A couple of year ago (wow, has it really been that long?) I bought some small Birdies garden beds to use as tree planters for a little espalier tree garden, because large sections of my yard are sitting on an excessive amount of rock which isn't very conducive to having anything much grow besides weeds. I planted some marigolds between them, and when the marigolds passed on, I collected the seeds from the ones I most liked, and planted some little bush beans in their place.

View attachment 9720

I found that having to bend down to pick the beans made me feel older than I actually am very quickly, although I persisted, the plants grew better than anticipated, and they also persisted much longer than anticipated. I got so many beans off them that I couldn't even give that many away at the time, and after I had no more space in the freezer, I eventually just let them go, stopped watering them, collected enough dried beans to plant a lot more in the future, and let the ground level of the garden suffer and die back, because I wasn't going to be bending over that far to deal with it anymore, it was just too hard.

All the trees went into bloom last Spring, along came a Spring windstorm and blew all the blossoms off the trees, and that was the end that that season of fruit... or so I thought. Somehow both my peach trees managed a full load of fruit each, my sugar plum managed to grow 4 plums, and two of my apple trees maintained one apple each. It seemed weird to nurture a single apple on each tree, but I did it anyway and they were both delicious enough to be worth it, or at least I thought so. If nothing else it gave me a taste of what was to come, which was great.

That's where the joy of this garden ended. My dog started getting into the garden and digging and making a mess, and ate my little banana pup. I put the green garden wire around to stop him, and it did, he saw that as a "not allowed in there" and didn't go in there anymore even though he could have jumped over it easily enough. Then I got stuck puppy sitting someone else's dog, and that dog had no issues with jumping the little garden fence and digging things up, and my dog decided that looked like fun and started doing it too, and he kept doing it even after the other dog was gone. I put chicken wire around the garden to keep him out, and that worked for a while, but he eventually figured out how to tear it down, and he also figured out how to tear down the wires supporting the trees. Then a few extreme thunderstorms killed the solar lights and the remaining wires supporting the trees, the dog kept getting in and digging holes, the trees went dormant at the start of winter, and the only thing left growing in the garden was a new little mandarin tree and loads of disappointment.




View attachment 9721

But I am not so easily defeated.

I decided to get in touch with Birdies Garden Products and ask some questions, which lead to me scouring their website looking at all their different beds, asking more questions, and eventually putting in an order for not just a few new beds, but also for some specific pieces, mostly flat panels, but also some extra specific corner pieces. My goal is to jigsaw puzzle the bed pieces together to create one large non-standard shaped bed to create more raised bed space so I can eliminate the spaces between the trees and grow strawberries under and around them at a height that isn't quite so painful to reach.

The Birdies beds and bits and pieces arrived yesterday. It took me most of the day today to unpack them, and in doing so I realised that one of the beds I'd ordered arrived the wrong colour - my fault, I didn't check the order properly before confirming the purchase, but that's okay, I just ordered another one the right colour and I do have a use for the odd coloured one in another section of the yard that will be done in the further future so it's not a waste, just a change of colour coordination for a different section of the yard in the future. Anyway, there was so much to unpack that among other household chores between boxes, by the time I was done, it was well into the afternoon and I was exhausted (I must say, Birdies doesn't skimp on the quality of their boxes, half the battle with setting up their garden beds is getting the boxes open!) So, I decided to rest for the evening and come here and start a thread telling you all about it, that I can keep updating as I progress in my mission, as it's now too dark to do much more outside and I'm too stuffed to do much more inside other than sit and type.

View attachment 9722

Excuse the dirt on the walls and the hole in the wall, this is part of my laundry room where the dogs get locked in occasionally when needed. The dog I was puppy sitting didn't like that idea and tried to eat his way out of the room through the wall, and I haven't fixed it yet because, well, it's the laundry, in this town it's actually a miracle there's any internal lining on the laundry walls in the first place. It'll get fixed one year, and it does get cleaned now and then, but the dogs just muddy it up first chance they get so I don't put too much effort into that too often. And I only just noticed that the walls in my laundry are painted the same colour as the Birdies beds. Weird.

I was planning today to repaint the support posts in the garden, but time got away from me, so I'll have to do that on Monday because rain is forecast for tomorrow, and I'll need a day for everything to dry out after it. I'm going to paint them a brown colour that the paint shop matched to a rusty bit of metal for me, because the reomesh will rust over time and once it does, I'd like the posts and the rust to not stand out against each other too much and look like it's all meant to be that colour. So tomorrow I guess I'll just have to deal with the trees instead whilst I wait, which will mean pruning them all back and transferring them into large pots for safe mobile keeping, as I'm going to have to do that before putting the new garden bed in place because the current ones are in the way of doing that. Then once the garden bed is in place, filled up, and the trees back where they belong, I'll put up the reomesh trellising, and a makeshift gate, and laugh at my dog's disappointment at not being able to get in and dig around in there. After all that, then I can plant my strawberries and just wait for everything to burst into bloom come spring.

But it won't end there, because I'll be jigsaw puzzling my garden beds in the front yard as well after the espalier tree garden is complete, and that will be an even bigger job with even crazier garden bed shapes, so stay tuned for that one.

Haha, I know that feeling! Putting together Birdies beds really does feel like a giant outdoor jigsaw puzzle—minus the missing pieces (hopefully ). But once they’re up, they look amazing. Can’t wait to see your setup!

 

[Grandmother Goose]

Love the perseverance this whole journey feels like half horticulture, half battleground, and full-on passion project.


Birdies are a great choice, especially with the modular build. I’ve worked with them before on a project where we had to elevate everything due to gopher issues and compacted clay, and those flat panels saved us. Jigsaw-puzzling it together was oddly satisfying, and being able to tailor it to the space made a big difference in both looks and usability. Also, the paint color match with your laundry room? That’s too good maybe you were subconsciously planning that all along.


On the shipping side of things, just a heads up for when you're tackling the front yard builds since you’re working with extra panels and customized shapes, it might be worth asking Birdies (or whoever you order from) if they can bundle the parts using transport and cargo services rather than standard parcel shipping. That way the longer pieces stay protected and you’ll avoid getting multiple boxes over multiple days especially helpful when you’re mid-project and already juggling enough. SprinterEmergency.ca is great I use them a lot especially this year when I needed some delicate bird baths delivered.

I hadn't thought of it as a battleground, but yeah, you're not wrong. I'm fortunate enough to be in Australia, so I was able to phone Birdies during normal business hours, and order exactly the pieces I needed, and it all arrived packed a bit differently because it wasn't an order for standard garden beds. I plan on keeping the rest of my yard to normal bed designs from now on, as my curiosity to see what can be done with Birdies beds has been satiated and my desire to have an oddly shaped front garden bed to wrap around the yard and tree to separate that yard from the driveway worked.

Stay tuned as in years to come I'll be (hopefully if I live long enough to gather the $ to do it) creating Birdies bed veggie garden labyrinth. Yeah, instead of making a labyrinth in my yard with hedging, I'm going to do it with Birdies raised beds in which I'll grow all my veggies. That might take a while though, because that won't be a cheap project.

 

[Grandmother Goose]

Winter weather weirdness. My flower garden is in flower, and what isn't in flower soon enough will be.

I can't remember what these plants are called, and right now I can't be bothered looking up the name. They were a spur of the moment "Oh that's pretty, let's see if this will grow and what it might attract" purchase at a local plant shop, and they have grown, and grown, and flowered, and flowered, and they haven't stopped at all. Hover flies, some very tiny native bees and wasps, and some butterflies like them.

On the background of the red one is the dark red remains of an amaranth plant, which I have cut down as it's season has passed but I kept the lower branches as they're going to seed, hoping I might be able to get some to grow again. I grew it for the brilliant dark burgundy-red colour of the foliage and to see how it grows, because the point of my front yard is to be pretty and wildlife attracting, and it fit the garden chaos that is evolving out there. I found that it worked brilliantly as a water meter. When the garden bed was a bit hot and dry and needed water, it wilted first and very obviously, and once I watered well it perked up again. So, I'll be growing that every summer, one plant in each bed to use as my water meter because that worked even better than sticking my finger in the soil.

My potted midyim/midgim/midjim/midgym/however you want to spell it - seems no one can make up their mind how that is meant to be spelled, but midyim and midjim seem to be the most common versions - berry has yet to bare fruit, it has flowered a couple of times when it was tiny, but it's now huge, hoping maybe this year might be the one... though I think I'm going to have to repot it before too long, before it gets too large, as I don't want to have to break the pot to get it out. I really need to find a best sized pot to put the plant in that can sit in the decorative one so that can't happen. Loving the pinkish bronze new foliage on it at the moment.

This is my little rusty fairy, she's made of iron and is strangely heavy, sitting next to a pink rain lily, which I'm hanging out for it to grow a lot more so I can propagate it through the garden because the flowers are so delightful when they come up - which only happens after a heavy rain, which is so cool. I don't know how they can tell the difference between rain and me watering the garden, must be something to do with the pH is my guess. Though there was one time I forgot that I left the hose dripping on it and it bloomed a flower a few days later, so maybe it's more about how long the water is pouring through the soil? It doesn't like wet feet, that can rot it, but... hmm... must experiment more with that plant.

In the background are a couple of baby Pandorea jasminoides, I gave up trying to get the Pandorea pandorama snowbells that I wanted, I can add more Pandorea versions later on as the foliage all looks the same, it's only the flowers that are different. As it stands I have a pink flowering one and white flowering one here in the full-sun part of the garden bed, and one of each on the other side of the garden under the dappled shade of the tree. They'll grow and blend together, I'm just curious as to which pair will grow faster - hot and a bit dryer area or the cooler, dappled shade, more water area. And right in the middle is a bright orange callendula, which I was planning on growing and propagating in pots that I could put out around Halloween, but last year their flower timing was a bit off, and the hot summer made it rough on the potted plants, so it ended up in the garden. I've ended up with a few plants in the garden that weren't meant to be there for the same reason, but such chaos adds to the charm.

And here we have the starry night petunias which started out dark purple with some spattering of white spots and as it's grown have become white with a splattering of dark purple spots, but that's okay, it's interesting either way. This was also an experiment, I wanted to see if it would survive the cold of winter as we do get a bit of frost here in the pre-dawn, but noooooo, it didn't get knocked back by frost, it bloomed and boomed and bloomed more. If Petunias are going to behave like that in my garden, I really must get more of them.

Behind it is an allegedly rare type of salvia, which I've fallen in love with. It was a seed packet that I mixed with other seeds as a mixed chaos scatter, most of which didn't come up, but this salvia did and I want more of it... but I can't remember where I bought the seeds from. I hope it self-seeds its way around the garden bed a bit more over time. With the random seed scattering I ended up with some Mexican Primrose, aka pink primrose, which my grandmother and mother used to grow. They planted it in a shady spot, which helps keep it under control because it's a full-sun plant but does okay in the shade but not quite well enough to take over a garden like it normally does. That was my plan... but it failed and somehow the seeds must have stayed dormant until I went digging around in the garden and moved some soil into the sunny area, now I've got a rapidly spreading cluster of them. Oops. Oh well, doesn't matter, if they take over that area of the garden bed it doesn't matter, I can always just keep cutting them back so they don't completely choke out all the other plants and rescue any that aren't sharing the space well by moving them elsewhere. I THINK the strappy leafed things poking through the spot where the petunia foliage meets the pink primrose foliage are freesias. If so, it shouldn't be too much longer before they're flowering. Another plant I really want to get more of, because they smell amazing.

I did have a native myoproium fine leaf growing in this pot, but it croaked during a summer heatwave, proof that not all native plants can handle as much hot dry weather as the labels claim. It can handle an east coast hot dry spell, not a Broken Hill hot dry spell. So I replaced it with a not native succulent I found sick and on special at the local hardware store on their little plant clearance table, took it home and potting it up and it has turned into this magnificent specimen with all its vibrant yellow and orange bits tipping the ends of the otherwise light green plant, and it seems to really not be bothered at all by heat and sun and dryness.

One native potted plant that did cope with the sun and heat is this cockie's tongue, which is flowering for me for the first time and I'm over the moon about this one. I never expected it to be quite that prolific with flowers let along that colourful. Now I'm wondering, if it's going to do that in a pot, what would it do if I put it in the ground?

Not flowering yet but getting close are my pair of hardenbergias, one white one purple, looks like they're getting ready for an explosion of colour. I was hoping they'd wind and climb their way up the tree a bit better than they have, but oh well, I'll give them a bit more time I guess, they're not going anywhere else after all.

 

[Grandmother Goose]

So I have just learned there's a 10,000 word limit, so splitting this in roughly half...

Another colourful foliage plant, my regular old-fashioned nandina, aka sacred bamboo... which isn't a bamboo. Most people for decades now have chased after the more compact shrubby nandinas, but I've always liked the original more. Sure, it's foliage seems kinda thin and loose and messy, but that's what I like about it... when it's in a bed with other plants around it, it grows up over and through them and splashes some colour about. If I wanted a ball or tight cluster of foliage colour there's plenty of other more impressive plants to use. And it's also putting out flowers.

Under the nandina and in front of a baby tree fern in the dappled shade of the grevillea tree is a chaos seed cluster of FKW. Some weeds, some flowers, there might even be some rhubarb among it, I don't know, and I won't know what everything is until it flowers and I can better identify it all. But whatever of all that is growing there, it's growing well.

One of the flowers from the new chaos cluster has flowered though, and it's pretty. I'm not sure what it is, but I'll look it up later. Some sort of miniature snapdragon is my pre-google guess.

This is one of my favourite plants in my garden, because I chanced upon it by pure luck of being at the right place at the right time, and I would have no idea where to get another one in Australia nowadays. Introducing my prawn/shrimp plant. They used to be very common, but fell out of fashion by the end of the 70's - yeah, it's weird, fashion in gardening is very much a thing - and everyone stopped growing and selling them. This was the first one I'd seen since I was a child, it was for sale at my local tip shop, way over-priced given it was half dead, potted into hard dried up clay dirt instead of potting mix, in a broken and brittle plastic pot, and they wanted $60 for it because the woman that runs the place isn't a fool, and I paid that $60 even though I had to borrow some money from my adult son to get it, and I have mollycoddled this plant back from the brink of death twice, and she's flowering once again. Yay! So worth it. Twice because after bringing her to life once, her flowers got badly scorched by the sun, so I moved her into the shade and she didn't like the transplant shock but she got over it eventually and started growing well for me at last.

Whether this is a normal, single dahlia, or a dwarf tree dahlia as it was sold as, I have no idea, but it's a dahlia, it does look exactly like a tree dahlia but smaller with darker almost purple flowers than a regular tree dahlia, and don't the bees love it! I've been getting a lot of bees in my yard since this plant began to flower. I had to put in a wooden stake and bundle it all up with some garden tie as it was flopping all over the place and looking really messy, I know better for next season to be better prepared and pin/stake the branches early before they flop about and make a mess.

Speaking of flopping about and making a mess, that is exactly what I want this plant to do and she's been doing a glorious job of it, and flowering, omg I don't think I've ever seen a pigface plant flower so much. She's been throwing out 4-5 new blooms every day for almost two months now. I've decided that I want to replace some of the native hanging pots with more of these pigface/iceplant succulents in different colours, because they can handle some extreme neglect, and it's the hanging pots around the garden that are going to give me grief, so these might be the way to go.

And here's a new little spot that I'm starting on the other side of the yard underneath a raised bathtub pond, but more on that later, because I've rambled too much already.

 

[Mandy Onderwater]

Never enough rambles! We need more!

I love your garden! You are an inspiration. It makes me really want to grow flowers myself (though, as it appears, I have a black thumb towards flowers). I'm currently killing all the weeds out front and I've been tempted to build a raised bed along the front of the house. I'll have to take pictures and ask for advise, as I don't want to cause rusting in our steel-framed house due to reduced airflow if I build raised beds. Plus, there's a drain right against the house, so I'll have to check how a raised bed would affect accessibility to clean that. Otherwise it gets nice morning sun, with mostly some throughout the day. So perhaps I'd have to look for flowers that don't mind that.

I am absolutely in love with those starry night petunias - they are beautiful!

Oh, how I'd love to stroll through your garden...

 

[Grandmother Goose]

Okay, another little ramble then. I spent all day today filling up my new bathtub pond... and it got dark too quick to get any photos.

A few months ago, I paid a local semi-retired fella to weld me up a frame to hold a pink cast iron bathtub raised above the ground that I picked up from a local horse owner that no longer needed it as a water trough. I spraypainted the frame with a rust effect paint, and it's been sitting there patiently waiting for me to do more with it ever since.

I wanted it raised above the ground so I could grow plants underneath it, reach into the bath without bending over, eliminate any risk of accidently falling into it, be low enough that a small child could peer over the edge to see what's in there, and high enough that any child that could climb in should be old enough to not be so stupid as to do that, or at least old enough to not drown in there if they are. I think I've succeeded. I haven't found any drowned kids in there yet, so it must be working.

I had everything I needed except the motivation for a few weeks now, finally got stuck into it today.

I cut the base off a large round plastic pot and stuck that on one end of the bath. Filled the pot near to the brim with glorious rich thick mud which I made by sifting a pile of the actually pretty good soil on that side of the yard and adding water. I also filled the rest of the bath to approximately 1/3rd of the way up with the same mud. Then I planted a water lotus rhizome in the mud in the bathtub, then sprinkled a layer of fine black pebble that I scavenged from a second-hand fish tank that's been sitting on my front veranda patiently waiting for me to do something with it. I then transplanted some of my nardoo from my little pond, plus a baby reed and another little fine leafed oxygenating plant into the top of the black plastic pot, sprinkled a layer of the black fishtank pebble over it, then filled it up with water after getting distracted and watering the garden first.

Then I realised that I needed to drill an overflow hole into the bath lest it rain a lot, so I did that. Then I went through a box of ornaments I've been stashing for putting in the rest of the garden, found all the frogs, ducks and geese, a little witch fishing with a skeleton fish on the end of her line, and a turtle, sat them around the edge of the bath and in the top of the black pot on a lump of white quartz I found among all my natural rocks. I also added the frog and black swan decorations I had by the little old pond, along with a solar light... which I only remembered to move to the big pond because it turned on as it was getting dark.

Tomorrow's jobs are to glue down most of the little ornaments, so they can't run away or go for an unsupervised swim, get rid of the baby weed seedlings that are starting to pop up under the tub pond, dismantle the old pond, and replace it with a really nice black sink that I picked up at the local tip shop to use as a visiting critter water bowl. Also, cut to length, clean, primer, and paint some pvc pipes, then put them in the pot in the pond as a frog hotel. I recently learned that we do get green tree frogs out here. I thought we only got the ground dwelling desert species, but apparently there's several types of frogs, GTF being one of them, and they love frog hotels, so I'm making one. I wonder how long it will take for a frog to move in and call it home? Then if I have the energy, I might put the native hanging plants and a couple of potted ones I have into the ground and get some more different coloured iceplants/pigface to put in the hanging pots... and then take photos... if it's not too dark again by then.

 

[Grandmother Goose]

What was I planning on doing today? Oh that's right, NOT going outside into the

 

[Grandmother Goose]

The weather has eased up a little bit today, but there's more to come. I have managed to get my little pond decorations glued down so they don't run away. The black swan isn't glued down, he's held in place by sitting on a hefty rock (he's body is hollow), and I'm thinking about moving him to the other side of the pond with the ducks and geese, leaving more room for more frog decorations at the other end. One thing I'm wondering about though, is whether the fake frogs will cause any problems with any real ones that decide to come by. I doubt it as I've steered away from any that actually look in any way real.

The water is beautifully clear and clean at the moment but for a little ring of organic matter that floated and stuck to the sides which I'll wipe off later. My little overflow hole - which is sitting behind the grey stone frog - worked for not overflowing the tub in the past few days.

Next week I'll be buying some aquatic plants to put in the main part of the pond to keep the water clean, and a water testing kit. Once I can be certain the water parameters are good and relatively stable, I'll go and get some frog-egg-safe fish for it. A new pet store recently opened here and they currently have a good stock of Murray River Rainbow fish, which are frog safe natives that can handle the weather conditions here, so they'll be ideal. Hopefully they'll still have a supply of them by the time I can safely put fish in the pond. I also need to get some white pebbles to put in the round bin and get my frog hotel in there. I'll hopefully be able to get the frog hotel done by Wednesday.

The water is the same height in both the tub and the pot, but the soil is higher in the pot, making the water in the pot 1.5 inches/3-4cm deep, and the rest of the tub it's closer to 8 inches/20cm deep. The pink sink in the background I'm setting up to be a bird feeder, I was going to go bird feeder/bird bath, but it's a bit too deep for a bird bath, so I've been trying to figure out how to work around that. I have ideas, but it's a problem to solve for later as there are a lot of other things to do that take priority atm.